James Cohan Gallery

I first heard of Thomas & Associates in 2001. I had just finished grad school and was looking for work. A professor who was friends with the company’s current president, Geri Thomas, told me I should check out the art recruiting and consulting firm. I sent out a resume to them and never heard back.
I now see that as a sign of a good recruiter. I had no experience or particular aptitude for commercial arts administration, and that would have been clear from even a quick look at my resume.

Founded in 1999—just two years prior to my own discovery of the firm—Thomas & Associates provides staffing, consulting and professional development seminars exclusively for arts and culture. The company has taken on top-tier clients like the Studio Museum, James Cohan Gallery, and Sean Kelly. Thomas herself has taught arts administration at NYU since 2002, and helped to create a certificate program at the university in Art Collections Management and Display. Prior to that time, Thomas owned a gallery, worked in PR for Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum, and held the Director of Exhibitions and Collections position at the Jewish Museum.

13 years after my original application, I reached out to her again. I wanted to know what recruiting firms do, between fielding grad student resumes and helping museums put on major exhibitions. Now that I’m a blogger, I finally get to find out what happens behind the scenes at the offices of Thomas & Associates.

Let’s not sugarcoat this: Chelsea has become a glittering straight jacket for any artist who actually wants to experiment. The collector market tethers these artists to calculated production where artistic value and cost never seem to go hand in hand. This makes it hard to get too excited about opening night in Chelsea, and in fact, but for a handful of openings, we’re not. This is what we recommend.

This week in Cheslea, we saw shows at Asya Geisberg, I-20, Leo Koenig, Andrea Rosen, Gagosian, Mary Boone, Foxy Production, Wallspace, and James Cohan. This marks week one on our crusade to cover different galleries each trip.